Rabelais, he says, is the first writer of the age of print. Just as Luther is the last writer of the manuscript age. Of course, he says, without print Luther would have remained a simple heretical monk. Print, he says, scooping up the froth from his cup, made Luther the power he became, but essentially he was a preacher, not a writer. He knew his audience and wrote for it. Rabelais, though, he says, sucking his spoon, understood what this new miracle of print meant for the writer. It meant you had gained the world and lost your audience. You no longer knew who was reading you or why. You no longer knew who you were writing for or even why you were writing. Rabelais, he says, raged at this and laughed at it and relished it, all at the same time.
Gabriel Josipovici from Everything Passes
Twenty-year-old Maverick Sabre is an Irish Londoner equipped with a unique hip-hop style and a blessed way with words. For more info, music and pictures take a look at the Beatnik interview.
Reads like this:
He had bought a small plot of ground a few miles from where they lived and he had just erected on it two glass-houses in which he proposed to cultivate tomatoes for profit. He had come back one evening and asked her if she’d ever noticed tomatoes in the shops. ‘A full chip [...]
I’ve made a great discovery. . . and I’ll tell you what it is: the strongest person in the world is the one who stands alone
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.
Henrik Ibsen’s opening play at the newly refurbished Sheffield Crucible, is An Enemy of the People, with Anthony Sher in the role of Dr Stockmann.
It’s a disturbing drama, [...]
Margaret was a tiny self-contained woman with silver hair, gold earrings, striped trousers and a pale mauve body-warmer. Perhaps she had been a beauty, but her chin was doubtful now and there was crazy-paving around her eyes. Tiny feet, well-shod in leather lace-up shoes.
Grace was over-weight and all her parts were subject to more than [...]